Don't Buy Sony

In February of 2008, I bought a Sony Bravia LCD flat panel TV. This August, a series of lines appeared from the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Customer support was unable to help me and recommended I call in a repairman.

He wasn't even in the door before he diagnosed the problem as a bad panel. He accessed the hours of use from the TV and got 7,031 hours. After a short sigh, he said that the panels for these televisions were rated for 125,000 hours of viewing. That means if I watched TV for eight hours a day, three-hundred and sixty five days a year the panel shouldn't have failed for 42.8 years. What's more, he added that the overwhelming majority of his service calls were about faulty panels and that the panel would eventually fail completely, leaving me with a black screen. All told, after shipping/labor/parts, it would cost me $3200.00 to repair a TV that cost me $2400.00. His recommendation was to contact customer service and hold Sony accountable. What struck me was his admission that I would have to "stay on them" to get any results.

The first rep I spoke to told me that since the TV was no longer under warranty that Sony had no obligation to replace the panel or fix the TV. Not satisfied with this, I asked to speak to the next echelon of customer service. Perhaps realizing that it is easier to keep a customer than to get a new one, he offered me a new TV for $1400.00. When I refused, he told me that the offer was good for one week. Since this was getting me nowhere, I decided to take a page from my company's president and wrote a letter to Sony's chairman Howard Stringer.

I am aware that simply writing a letter to the chairman of a brobdingnagian company like Sony seems naive and foolish. The trick is to send it by private carrier. This means that someone has to sign for it and you can track the parcel and confirm it was received. Even if it never makes it to the intended person, it ends up on someones' desk (best case scenario is their personal assistant). In this parcel I included a letter, photos of my TV and one of my business cards as proof that I work in quality control.

After hearing nothing for five weeks, I received another phone call from customer service. In a tone that sounded like I pulled him from his lunch, a customer service rep quickly rambled through a series of TVs and prices. I asked him point blank whether Sony was going to replace the panel. He said no and gave me the same week long ultimatum on the TV quotes. At this point, it was obvious that Sony would not stand behind their product. I would have to get my pound of flesh another way.

After not hearing from Sony for two months, I hatched a plan. In 2009, I bought a house on the corner of a very busy four-way stop. There is both an elementary and a high school within a mile of my house. One of the main highway on-ramps to Chicago/Indianapolis/Detroit is also only four blocks from my home. Bottom line, there are a lot of people that walk, bike and drive by my house everyday. There is even a very bright street lamp that illuminates my yard at night. I decided to erect two huge signs on the corner urging people "Don't Buy Sony". Once completed, I took it a step further and dedicated my Facebook page to my boycott, even using a photo of the signs as my profile picture.

Within a week of the signs being up I had a visitor knock on my door who wanted to find out, "What the signs were about." Roughly twenty-four hours later, I got another call from customer service. Coincidence? This customer service rep asked me for a copy of the receipt so he could , "See what he could do." As of this writing, he's done nothing. Again, I would up the ante.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, my good friend Joe helped me make a video for youtube ("Don't Buy Sony" on youtube.com or go to the video link at the bottom of this page). It took about three hours and I was absolutely floored by the results. While uploading the video on youtube, I found nearly five-hundred other Sony Bravia Problem videos with similar, sometimes worse, problems than mine. Remembering a scene from Fight Club, I had an epiphany. Ed Norton applies a formula to determine whether or not a faulty part is worth re-calling based on whether the damage caused is less than the cost of a recall. I believe that since many of these TVs have failed after their warranties have run out, Sony is denying any responsibility.

Perhaps the question is what is a reasonable product life for these new flat panel TVs? Is it because the old cathode-ray juggernauts practically put TV repairmen out-of-business that this low quality shocks us? There is also the switch to digital to consider. The government commandeered the radio signal and left the rest of us with digital. A format that unless you buy a special converter renders the old reliable CRT's obsolete, leaving us with a class of televisions that simply don't last. Sure, there is always a level of inherited risk when we put our money into new technology, but the fact that LCD panels have been around for over twenty years negates this. For most, the two to three thousand dollars we pay for these new TVs is a sizable investment. Not to mention the fact that if this is the kind of quality you can expect from a technology that has existed for over twenty years, what level of quality can you expect from these new 3D or internet TVs? Since the old dependable TVs are practically extinct, the short shelf-life of these flat panels is simply unacceptable.